Monthly Archives: January 2017

I have spent the last three days reading Mr. Kaplan’s 24 page rambling screed , ‘The Coming Anarchy‘, at The Atlantic published  in 1994, just to become familiar with his writing, and found a font of American white male paranoia … Continue reading →

@Larchmont @Lund Larchmont, I do find your reading of the political present fascinating, in its own way. It offers the Trump Party line without its necessary political context. Both you and Mr. Ganesh write in a style that is a pastiche … Continue reading →

Mr. Ganesh strikes a comic pose in his latest essay: He assumes the guise of that pearl clutching, porcine dowager Margaret Dumont, who is both attracted and repelled by the comic anarchy of The Marx Brothers. She is smitten with Groucho’s roguish banter … Continue reading →

@BLEX @Benign Brodwicz The self-congratulation, indeed hubris of the religious apologist, meaning in this case the Christian branch of the benighted Abrahamic Tradition, is unsurprising! The only thing that saved Christianity from its own provincialism was a heavy infusion of the … Continue reading →

Headline: The Tempting of the Media For this reader of Mr. Douthat’s latest political intervention, I am strongly reminded of that 1977 American best seller, ‘The Totalitarian Temptation’ by  Jean-François Revel. This book, an exercise in verbose anti-communist polemics, was … Continue reading →

Headline: Painful truths: psychologists unpick the ethics of empathy Sub-headline: Why putting yourself in others’ shoes can sometimes be a poor moral guide The headline and the sub-headline are indicative of a publication that worships at the alter of  the … Continue reading →

The most important ‘meeting’ at Davos  was the one between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in 1929. See Peter E. Gordon’s book ‘Continental Divide’ for the particulars of this truly momentous meeting/debate, between the two most prominent German philosophers of … Continue reading →

In Martin Wolf’s essay of Jan 17, 2017, he engages in the intellectual plunder of Benedict Anderson’s path-breaking  book ‘Imagined Communities’to frame his Ne0-Liberal hand-wringing. His seemingly perpetual state of mind and spirit. And the Tribalism that afflicts us, even … Continue reading →

This is how the president of New America pronounces on the possibility of Trumpism: ‘The world awaits America’s new social contract’. The ‘as if’ here is that Trump and his team of Corporatists are capable of even entertaining the mere … Continue reading →

Since the departure of gossip queen Tina Brown, The Daily Beast has come under the partial leadership of Neo-Con Michael Weiss, and it shows.  Leslie Gelb, a former Clinton employee/protege, is also disappeared.  While still  employed is  New Democrat Michael … Continue reading →